Idiosyncratic indie rover Jonathan Cenzual Burley follows 2011's road movie The Soul of Flies with an absurdist diversion that might have been pitched as Bill and Ted's Land and Freedom: the tale of a bearded International Brigade recruit (Andrea Calabrese) who tumbles through a rip in the space-time continuum and winds up in latter-day Salamanca. In a pointed inversion of comic form, it's the moderns who prove more guileless: credulous Catholics who need reminding of their country's hellish past to better appreciate the present. Meanwhile, the blast-from-the-past wanders the striking landscape, haunted by memories of a now-lost love. Burley's latest reminded me of Hal Hartley's The Book of Life – which had Jesus and the devil show up in pre-millennial Manhattan – while translating that film's cool anomie into a fresh, playful, increasingly affecting bonhomie.
The Year and the Vineyard review –a playful dig at Spain’s hellish past
This absurdist time-travel diversion might have been pitched as Bill and Ted's Land and Freedom, writes Mike McCahill